Here's a little grammar quiz from Erin Brenner of Right Touch Editing.

Pop quiz time! If I want you to play a song just for me and I don't want you to play it for anyone else, where in my sentence do I put only?

1. Only play me a song.
2. Play only me a song.
3. Play me a song only.

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Wendalyn Nichols, editor of the Copyediting newsletter, writes:

Recently on the Copyediting blog, I made a comment about Flag Day, saying we celebrated it rather than observed it. This was actually a follow-up to an earlier comment about Memorial Day, when I noted that it was to be observed rather than celebrated.  Continue reading...

New techniques of "digital archaeology" reveal long-lost secrets about how Thomas Jefferson tinkered with word choice while drafting the Declaration of Independence. University of Illinois linguist Dennis Baron has the full story.  Continue reading...

It was a Friday night and I was sitting at my computer studying Google maps. I had to give a speech to more than 200 people the next morning and — given my notoriously bad sense of direction — wanted to be sure I was heading for the right place.

Suddenly, my husband yelled from the basement four words no homeowner wants to hear: "We have a leak."  Continue reading...

Erin Brenner of Right Touch Editing provides "bite-sized lessons to improve your writing" on her engaging blog The Writing Resource. Here Erin wonders about the fate of spelling in the era of text messaging.  Continue reading...

Michael Lydon, a well-known writer on popular music since the 1960s, has for many years also been writing about writing. Lydon's essays, written with a colloquial clarity, shed fresh light on familiar and not so familiar aspects of the writing art. Here Lydon shines a light on literary realism, the style by which writers "make the imaginary real and the real imaginary."  Continue reading...

Users of Amazon's e-reader, the Kindle, can not only highlight their favorite passages, they can see what everyone else is highlighting. University of Illinois linguist Dennis Baron ponders the consequences.  Continue reading...